Life (45 page)

Meanwhile Clare, who’d moved to California to be near her daughter Jonnie, reckoned Anna a shameless traitor. Anna had heard news of her lost friend when she last visited Manchester. She and Nirmal were selling a training program to Nitash Davidson (who was in management now and looking very prosperous); she’d been visiting him to talk about course requirements. Apparently Clare was collaborating with her daughter on some billionaire’s private nanotech project. When she’d heard that, Anna had been filled with pity. So she’d finally given up, sold out. Poor Clare, she’s working for the company, profit for the rich inc. But what if it were Anna who had lost her way? What if her struggle to get that magic “Dr” in front of her name, and
university of
after it, had been a waste of precious time? Second-in-command of a cash-strapped university science department doesn’t mean you’re a respectable scientist, not these days. It means you are a PR and marketing exec, only without the salary…

She left the conference hotel brooding.

It was a damned cheek for Miguel to take her aside and pep-talk her like that.

Find something sexy. Ha! If he only knew

Ever since Sungai, Anna had been waiting for somebody to unveil SURISWATI’s bombshell about the human sex chromosome pair. Or better still, for some other less controversial experimental proof of viral-mediated lateral transfer effecting change to emerge. She
needed
that revelation. What could she do? She was a breadwinner, she had no right to chase after a mirage. No right, no time, and a powerful wariness. Controversy is food for the strong, death for the weak. If she went after the effect Suri had found, and it wasn’t there, then unless she somehow kept the work secret, Anna Senoz would be dead in the water, finished.

Simon’s family lived in a condo that had been a fine big Victorian family mansion; in landscaped grounds with a fitness suite, and a pool and squash courts. The deal reminded her of Nasser Apartments, without the austere cachet of the urban tropics. She wondered, did the stakeholders in Gradgrind Gracious Living have a rota? Did they take it in turns to take a private turn around the shrubbery? She was glad to find Simon alone when she arrived in the early evening. Cara was that significant five years or so younger, clean living and sensible, which tended to put a brake on things.
They all
socializing couldn’t get up to speed in sober company.

“Once,” she said, when the children were in bed and they were opening their third bottle, “I was at a conference in Toronto, dead beat after functioning at full stretch all day after a rotten
dangerous-
feeling red-eye flight from Heathrow, including a casual turning back for spare parts, typical BA. My phone rings at 3 am. It’s Miguel from Spain, saying
what color panties are you wearing;
and then he says, lets make love like this (meaning wank online). Afterwards you can send me your moistened undies to keep, and I will send you mine. He did apologize, that time. He was drunk; he’d figured the time difference wrong… Oh, Miguel is okay. He’s great, a friend, but with some of them it gets so wearing. They come on to me relentlessly, these male colleagues of mine. I take it lightly, I flirt and act sassy, what else can you do? But of course I know what it means, and it’s not friendly. I’m supposed to have
forgotten
what ‘fucking someone up’ usually implies, in a professional context? I’m supposed to have not been listening, when a few moments before they were all crowing over the way they absolutely
shafted
some poor loser? Sometimes I wish the sexual revolution had never happened. All it means is that I can’t call them on the shit that’s going on with them.”

“No,” said Simon. “I think you’re wrong. You wouldn’t want to go back to the days when no one was supposed to let on and girls were supposed to keep their knickers locked up; it was worse. Hey, you’ve enjoyed the revolution, much as any woman I know. When I think of you and Spence, that summer… Hahaha!”

Affluence suited him. He had the presence, in this conventionally well-furnished room, that comes from regular work at the gym, and his conservative casuals sat easily on his older but better-tended body. Though there were already touches of grey in the nappy curls and lines around his eyes, Simon had become good-looking, which she didn’t remember him to have been in those old days. But not altogether happy, she thought—

“Good as the telly, eh?” She grinned. “Yeah, I remember girl power. It was bloody good fun. I couldn’t resist the energy of it. It was really, really important that you didn’t have to be the one saying no. You could stuff being the banker, being
in charge
of sexual access, rationing it so’s not to be called a slag… But did it get us anywhere? Looking back, I feel like what we post-women’s-lib girls were expressing, with all that license, was our anger, at the deals you have to make when you declare peace with an old enemy. You have to give up the privileges of the oppressed, and we didn’t want to do that, not just when we had the muscle to hit back… There was a point when we saw that we had to let bygones be bygones, or go for vengeance. We went for the wonderbra option, twin turrets blazing: and
la lutte continue.
”

“I don’t believe you’ve ever worn a wonderbra.”

“Mm, nah. Underwiring is nasty, I’d rather work out. But I’ve used my sex as a weapon, I’ve learned to do that. We all do it, women in science, for all the good it does us. You can use sex, and make men suffer, wearing the full chador. I’ve seen
that
too.”

“Tell me…” said Simon, ruefully, and changed the topic. “How’s Spence, anyway? You and him still okay, in this battleground?”

“Oh, fine. Still poor as church mice… That’s another thing I wish, another wrong turn. Elective poverty was great at the time, but failing to make ends meet at our age is not cool.”

Simon checked the bottle, fetched a fourth, and opened it. “Don’t worry. You and Spence will always be cool. You know, ever since you came down to Beevey Island that time, or maybe it was at your wedding, you two have reminded me of that Fred Pohl story, I think it’s called ‘The Midas Touch’? Where the production-consumption pump has gone wild, so that if you’re disgustingly poor you have to slave at consuming all kinds of
stuff,
and you can tell the privileged rich few, because they’re dressed shabby and drive a miserable little old car—”

He broke off, pop-eyed in consternation—

“Not that! I mean, not that—!”

Anna burst out laughing, and they both collapsed in helpless giggles.

“In vino veritas,
” said Anna gravely, when they could laugh no more.

“Okay, okay. D’you want a meal by the way? It’s late, but we could dial a takeaway?”

“Nah. I think I ought to go to bed, sorry. Got to be up early in the morning.”

Cara was at her Italian class, which was traditionally followed by a non-alcoholic pub session with girl friends. She’d be back soon, and Anna felt too drunk to be sociable. They cleared bottles, glasses, and snack food residue out into the kitchen.

“D’you ever hear from Ramone these days?”

Anna shook her head. “Nope. That connection’s pretty well broken.”

“She’s living in the States now, isn’t she? With that artist and his wife? Seems weird.”

The small room, with the gaunt high ceiling, remnant of its life as some Victorian scullery or housemaid’s closet, was full of gleaming doors. She didn’t know which would be the dishwasher and which would eject her into outer space. “Weird? Nothing’s weird now. Horses getting sodomized in the senate, every day of the week.”

“I mean, it doesn’t sound very feminist. Two women sharing a guy, lesbian sex as male entertainment—”

“You don’t know how it works.” But she was willing to bitch. “Maybe it’s like Daz and the modeling: she’s made her fortune on female stuff-strutting, and retired. Next opus she’ll be back into violent porn. Where am I sleeping? On the couch?”

“I’ve made up Tabitha’s bed in the kids’ room, that way Cara won’t disturb you when she comes in.”

“Oh… Okay.”

The flat had three bedrooms, one of which was heavily occupied by an industry-standard server and other office stuff. Anna had seen Tabitha, the seven-year-old, and Jemelle, the three-year-old, snuggling down in their parents’ big bed at story time. She realized that they had not been removed at any point.

“You’ll have the room to yourself, don’t worry. They sleep with us,” said Simon, reaching to replace an unused glass on its proper shelf. There was a grimness in his expression, which should have warned her to shut up.

“What, all the time?”

“Yeah. It’s the…family bed idea. Makes them very secure. It’s more natural.”

“Wow,
Simon
—” She rearranged her tone, feeling a complete heel. “That must be nice.”

“You get used to it. Jemelle doesn’t half kick though.”

For a moment their eyes met: and… and nothing. No way would Anna and Simon change the good thing they had. Especially not when Cara was due home any minute.

She woke in the night and lay awake in a sad state of alcohol-related alertness, crowded out by a heap of immaculate soft toys, wondering pruriently when
did
Cara and Simon have sex? Once every four years? Or did they just
do it,
quickly and quietly, when the little girls were asleep? Maybe they hired a hotel room, in the Japanese way, maybe they used the living room couch. She was ashamed of herself, but that brief, bitter downtrodden look that had escaped Simon’s guard… Poor Simon, what malign force had driven her to talk non-stop about over-sexed sex scientists? Pity he couldn’t have stayed with Yesha. It must be hateful to change partners, to have whole sections of your own history sealed-off behind you, memories you can no longer treasure. But Yesh was a performer, an artist, she had to go on tour, this week in Amsterdam, next month in Rome. Simon had wanted a good old-fashioned family life, and now he had one.

Between new, mean girl-power in the workplace and old, virtuous woman-power at home, the blokes have a hard time these days.

On her way home from Sheffield she went to visit Marnie Choy in hospital and then to Rosey McCarthy’s house in Norwood, where Rosey lived with the two adopted Tim children, the two young children of her second marriage, and a live-in nanny. And with Wol, unofficially: who was back in favor, the one-night-stand toyboys who had followed the fertile but obnoxious second Mr Rosey having vanished.

Marnie had ovarian cancer. Her treatment wasn’t going very well.

For years Anna and Rosey had met very rarely, no more frequently than either of them had seen Marnie. But already the sick woman seemed far away, and Anna and Rosey close companions—as if they had spent their lives like this, elbows on Rosey’s kitchen table, among the bunches of opening leaves in pottery jars, the sleeping cats, the piles of newspaper, the fragments of legos and sheaves of kiddie art.

“I thought cancer was
curable
these days. What happened to all those miracle drugs?”

“Ah. Ovarian cancer’s manageable, not curable; and there are always exceptions.”

“God, you sound like your mother. That
ah…
sound. I phoned her, you know, when Marnie’s results came through, and I couldn’t get hold of you.”

“They’re going to try good old chemotherapy.”

“Chemotherapy is a challenging hobby they give you to occupy you while you’re dying.”

“Did my mum say that?”

“No! She’s too kind. It’s what my Dad said when he was on
his
chemo, in the dark ages: for the lung and liver tumors. Before the brain tumor that got the speech centers. Oh, God, poor Marnie. I keep remembering her in the Union Bar, screaming
I want a Man!
and laughing like a maniac…” Rosey’s eyes filled with tears. She dashed them away with a firm hand. “Hey, tell Spence thanks for the Shere Khan books. That was sweet of him. Italia’s terrified of them, but Robbie’s a big fan: he’s a proper little bruiser, revels in all the ultra violence. Could he sign them by the way?”